I went to Germany way back at the end of the 90′s (can’t remember which year, have to look it up), and absolutely fell in love with crappy East Berlin, all the huge communist buildings and roads – bullet holes everywhere and graffiti everywhere you look, minimalist electronic music cafes, and the hardest of techno at my favorite club ever which of course was also a shithole to look at, but the atmosphere was electric. When you looked out from the top of the berlinner dom all you could see as you looked east was a skyline of construction cranes EVERYWHERE… and it felt like the stazi were going to leap out and grab you at any time as you explored this locked away metropolis.

Youth hostels were the way I explored the world back in the post university days and I met people on subsequent trips like an American Marine and some other guy I can barely remember, probably South American I think – getting drunk with one weekend new friends in a strange city was one of the many many great experiences I have had around the world.

Going to the centre of the potsdammer platz really gave me a sense of how this city I couldnt get enough of was changing from being the grassy messed up expanse of space surrounded by blocks of flats and club tresor (who after 10 years were forced to move out of the bank vault to a new place I have not been to YET), the area of Berlin where Hitlers bunker was, and to see it  on subsequent trips turn from that to a techno city with the Sony building and exhibition centres showing you what the mass reconstruction was going to turn this into.

Taking the S Bahn deeper and deeper into the east to get to the Olympic stadium where there was almost nobody there on my first visit you could really feel the history that had taken place there as you walked around the stadium interior and saw the swimming pool, again the huge area at the entrance to the stadium – very Nazi architecture massive and impressive. I went back to the stadium on my third visit to see that it was being turned into a modern football stadium with some arch or roof type thing, robbing yet another piece of important history.

The history of WWII Germany and Berlin will always intrigue me and I’m so glad I went over there and saw things before modernisation really got into full swing, I have never seen a place like East Berlin in the 90′s and prefer to remember it how it was rather than what it probably is now.

I went there another two times since then, found it great as well but it could never be as fascinating as the first time. Anyway enough reminiscing, here’s the film about die mauer.

Hope you Germans had a happy Unity day yesterday, in 5 weeks it will be 20 years since the fall of the wall.